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I think it would be better to focus on the newer parts... how many people still actually have those parts and are worried about getting peak performance out of them?

I used my athlon2k boxen with the AGP slot and PCI slots until smoke started eminating from the motherboard one spring morning. It served me well until that point in time and I would not have replaced it if I was not forced to do so. Support for old parts/systems is important. I'd also like to point out that the AMD drones are more likely to care about support for their fancy new parts, which makes it even more important that free-to-do-as-they-please developers improve support for the older parts.

There may be an AGP vs PCIE difference here as well. That seems to be the other common factor to people seeing lower performance with the new stack. Make sure you're running the latest -ati (X driver) as well.

Comment

If you're referring to my comment, I was definitely guessing. There were a few users reporting slower-then-expected performance with the 300g driver, but not much info was provided other than verifying that they were actually running 300g and not the software rasterizer. AGP seemed to be a common factor across all (three ?), but there's no reason to treat AGP's contribution as anything more than a hypothesis.

Comment

So I guess one good question for the forum is whether anyone else is running Celestia on 300g, what their experience is, and what hardware and other driver bits they are running.

On the other hand, Celestia may not be a great test case here -- it seems to have different rendering paths for GL2 and for lower levels, so there would probably be different application code running on 300g than on the classic Mesa driver (since 300g exposes GL 2.1 while classic only exposes ~GL 1.5 IIRC).

Comment

Did a bit more reading on Celestia implementation... seems like the GL2 (GLSL) code paths may do substantially more processing than the <GL2 (ARB) paths.

I don't know if there is a Celestia option to force the ARB code paths or whether the driver would have to be hacked to expose a lower level of GL support, but one of those would at least allow an apples-to-apples comparison where the same application code is used with both 300g and classic driver implementations.

On the other hand, Celestia may not be a great test case here -- it seems to have different rendering paths for GL2 and for lower levels

You can choose which rendering path to use by pressing Ctrl-V. I am aware that r300g defaults to "OpenGL 2.0" whereas r300c can do no better than "OpenGL Vertex Program", but I am remembering to set r300g to "OpenGL Vertex Program" before making my comparison... ;-).